Summary of editorials from the Hebrew press 08-02-2017

Today's issues: The ill-conceived regulation law, the Court’s duty, the invisible motives of Monday’s unusual Gaza strike, and the inadvertent boost to Bannon.

The Jerusalem Post discusses the many problems with the settlement regulation law, which was passed by the Knesset on Monday night, and reiterates a previous call that the prime minister provide the people of Israel with his vision for the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations in the West Bank. The editor states: “If he has given up on the two-state solution, he should say so. If not, he should explain how he expects to still achieve a negotiated peace deal with the Palestinians despite taking unilateral measures like the regulation law,” and declares: “The majority of Israelis still wants to see Israel remain both Jewish and democratic. We would like to believe that the government and the prime minister agree. They need to explain how.”

Haaretz believes the Supreme Court must use its exceptional authority to overturn the law to expropriate private Palestinian lands in Judea and Samaria adopted by the Knesset on Monday night, and states: “The political circumstances, by which politicians from the right warn the court lest it intervene as everyone expects it to, makes it easier for the court to do the right thing. In a situation where overturning the expropriation law is an expected and necessary move, the court is not approaching the outer edges of constitutional law. Rather, it is simply fulfilling its professional and conscientious duty.”

Yediot Aharonot contends that the reason behind the recent escalation in the Gaza Strip is that the fighting on the Gaza border likely has other dimensions, which are less visible to the public, and states: “Israel is doing everything in its power to disrupt Hamas’s intensive tunnel digging; bombing Hamas posts from both the air and the ground may be part of that secret war.”

Israel Hayom believes that the recent by the Washington Post to discredit U.S. President Donald Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, inadvertently did just the opposite, and declares: “That he realizes the threat posed ‎by both radical Islamists and their Jewish and other ‘fellow travelers’ is a help, not a ‎hindrance, at a time when the greatest state sponsor of global terrorism has just received ‎billions of dollars with which to build nuclear weapons.‎"